Advocate: Without neighborhoods, center won't hold

Chris Churchil, Times Union

By Chris Churchill, The Advocate

Published 8:30 pm, Saturday, October 12, 2013

Troy's South End Tavern has closed along with some of its neighboring businesses. Downtown may be thriving, but such closings don?t speak to a citywide revival, The Advocate says. (Cindy Schultz / Times Union)

You don't have to take my word for it. You can read it in the New York Daily News, which recently devoted a multipage spread to the city and declared that Troy is where "a new generation of urban entrepreneurs is discovering opportunities."

Seriously, when you're downtown, it's tough to escape the sounds of pounding hammers and screaming saws, as old buildings are remade for new stores and apartments. The "wave of renovation," as the Daily News called it, is also a wave of optimism, and the paper won't be the last out-of-town publication to notice.

OK, but here's where I play Debbie Downer. Here's where I note that while downtown's progress is fantastic, no such lift is being felt in many of the city's neighborhoods.

On Thursday, I took a walk that started downtown and ended on the South Troy block where I once lived. It's a nice stroll, because Troy's a great town for pedestrians.

I made my way along Second and Third streets, where the renovated Troy extends for about a mile south of downtown. But by Canal Avenue and the Poesten Kill, the renovation wave trickles away.

My first-floor apartment was on Third Street between Madison and Monroe streets.

Now, outsiders sometimes see South Troy as a dangerous ghetto, but I'm here to tell you that's wildly unfair. Mostly, it's a blue-collar neighborhood with a sprinkling of yuppie-types and a few too many problem properties. There was a stabbing a block away when I lived there, but I personally never experienced crime.

I moved away four years ago. As I walked around Thursday, I saw more garbage than I remembered, and more houses slipping past the point of no return. The block's little diner is now a vacant storefront. The flower store is gone too, as is Mahr's Place, the legendary bar. Irish Mist and the South End Tavern are also memories.

Revival? I didn't see it.

To test my perception, I called Sid Fleisher, a community leader and landlord, and asked him about the neighborhood's fortunes. He didn't say the neighborhood is getting worse, exactly, but he also didn't say it's getting better.

"I'm not feeling the spinoff from downtown," Fleisher said. "I'm finding it more and more difficult to rent my apartments."

I'm focusing mainly on South Troy here, but I could just as easily be talking about other parts of the city, including North Central and Lansingburgh.

"There are people who haven't been part of the party so far," said Lansingburgh resident Joe Fama, who heads TAP Inc., a nonprofit architecture firm. "It's time to turn more attention to the neighborhoods."

Cities like Troy have tough-to-solve problems — like high taxes or struggling schools — that discourage middle-class home ownership. But when I lived in South Troy, I thought many of its quality-of-life issues could be fixed by more attention from city leaders.

Sidewalks were a disintegrating mess then, and I'm happy to say that many have since been replaced. The neighborhood remains shamefully short of parkland, and has little access to the Hudson or Poesten Kill. Too many drivers pass through its streets at recklessly high speeds, but I never saw anyone being ticketed.

Then, there are the massive trucks that shake houses as they thunder by.

For decades, the city has promised a new roadway that would get such trucks off South Troy's streets. But other priorities always come first, and the road never gets built. It's disgraceful.

"That road would be a real boon to the neighborhood," Fama said. "Those trucks don't belong on those streets."

Maybe South Troy's lift is coming. In a best-case scenario, downtown's success will ripple out to South Troy and North Central. The trick, then, will be ensuring that longtime residents aren't displaced.

But I fear a scenario in which Troy becomes another city with ever-starker income divisions, where a center with a growing supply of wine bars and yoga studios is framed by crumbling neighborhoods.

Downtown's revival is worth celebrating, but a true Troy renaissance would include the whole city.

The author of that Daily News article, by the way, is Suzanne Spellen, who moved to North Central after years in Brooklyn. Like many newcomers, Spellen was drawn to Troy by its rare combination of cheap real estate and amazing architecture, and she's been impressed by the energy downtown.

"But I don't think you can forget about the rest of Troy, and expect any sort of lasting revival," Spellen said. "It's just not going to happen."